as an art, and not as a mechanical act of
getting an illusion.

[Illustration: (From a Greek vase in the British Museum (E. 46).

FIG. 1.]

[Illustration: (From _Bulletino arch. Napol_. (1843, tom. 1, tav. 7).

FIG. 2.]

[Illustration: (From a drawing by Michelangelo (1854, 5, 13, i.), Print
Room, British Museum).

FIG. 3.]

It is interesting to trace in the history of an indigenous art the
development of drawing that shall ultimately express ideas of
three-dimensional form. Prof. Emanuel Loewy, in his _Rendering of Nature
in Early Greek Art_, demonstrates how the early Greek sculpture (and
that of all primitive peoples, children and ungifted artists) shows an
aversion from depth. Their reliefs are of the flattest description,
almost raised contours, and their figures in the round have at first
only one aspect, or flat facade, so to speak, then three and four
aspects, and finally at the date of Lysippus the figures are fully
rounded out, and the members project at liberty in all directions. Then
for the first time Greek sculpture showed a complete conception of the
body's corporeity (_Kurperlichkeit_). The primitive artist, however well
he may be _intellectually_ aware of the three dimensions of an object,
does not fully apprehend its true aspect as offered to the eye from one
point of view. Following this conclusion, it is easy to see also in the
drawing of the early Greeks, children and so on, the same lack of idea
of the third dimension. The figures on the vases of the "finest period"
(about 475 B.C.), despite occasional foreshortenings, have, when
considered as representations of solid forms, a papery appearance. They
have not half the draughtsmanship shown by the latter period of the vase
industry, where the figures, though careless, stereotyped and
ill-composed, come forwards (to use Prof. Loewy's description of later
sculpture), go backwards, twist and turn in space in a manner which
cannot be excelled. The reproductions in figs. 1, 2, 3 will illustrate
the development. The primitive draughtsman is at first bound by the
silhouette. Later, he desires to fill out the interior, but this cannot
be done without in great part modifying his contour lines, because they
are generally merely indications of the disappearing and reappearing
inner modelling, i.e. of the figure's third dimension. Finally, the
draughtsman in full possession of a feeling for the corporeity of the
object will determine his contour entir